Yesterday’s Boston Globe op-ed by Peter Baker and Robert Johnston, and the economic report on which it’s based, make a key point that I think is the cause of a lot of the conflict and distrust between fishermen and fisheries managers.
The underlying economics of any effort-based regulation–such as the current “days-at-sea” system for New England groundfish–mean that the average profitability of the fishing fleet is zero at the target catch level regulators set. This drives fishermen with capital to be more productive than the fleet average, and fishermen without access to capital are driven out of the fishery. Overfishing continues and regulators are forced to continually clamp down on fishing effort.
Under sectors, a form of “catch shares,” the underlying economics are to maximize profitability–both of individual boats and the fleet as a whole. Regulators set an annual catch limit, allocate portions of that catch limit in this case to fishing cooperatives, and fishermen are free to fish when and how they can make the most money per fish. It takes pressure off fishermen to catch as much fish as they possibly can just to break even.
Several times a year, EDF takes a delegation of fishermen, policy makers and other leaders in the ocean conservation community and fisheries industry to British Columbia to see, first hand, an effective catch shares program at work. Last week, Larry Epstein, Ayelet Hines, Michael Clayton, and Nicanor Requena of the EDF Oceans program hosted a delegation of fisheries stakeholders from Belize on an international exchange to visit the B.C. groundfish fishery.
Some of the fisheries managed by catch shares in the B.C. groundfish fishery have increased in value ten-fold as a result of healthier and improved fish stocks and habitat. During the conversations among B.C. and Belizean government managers, fishermen, and conservationists, the delegation learned how the B.C. catch share evolved and discussed lessons learned. In addition, the delegation visited the catch shares monitoring facility and observed the process of assessing and recording the catch at a dockside offload site.
